Professional Development

Thursday, November 19, 2009

I have posted fuller entries on the presentations I attended at ASIST 2009, but wanted to bullet some of the highlights/takeaways. I also enjoyed the poster sessions and the notorious SIG/CON evening session, during which leading information scientists poke fun at their profession. I also highly recommend Vancouver as a destination.

Plenary session: an audience member asked Tim Bray, “Distinguished Engineer” and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems: “Managing all these blogs, IM, cell phones, blogs – how do we do that? Also what about the human aspect of it? People just use their Blackberries all the time and are being rude

Tim’s answer to part 1: You just need to buckle down and figure it out

Tim’s answer to part 2: The technology is not the problem, it’s a behavioral / human problem.

Users in an online community can use a surprising array of sophisticated communication techniques, such as sarcasm, and “respected” users in a community can exert social influence through a pretty “thin” medium. (Rich Gazan)

This was a great session overall, considering how Web 2.0 has changed information behaviors in organizations, or has the potential to do so. The biggest takeaway for me was a statement made by Dr. Hazel Hall, Director, Centre for Social Informatics, School of Computing EdinburghNapierUniversity. She had done a study of corporate environments (including the public sector). She found that microblogging (Twitter) was the least used of new Web 2.0 tools, and had the lowest perceived usefulness. Yet, when she listed out how different Web 2.0 tools facilitated communication, she found that microblogging actually does combine many of the features of others, and perhaps we sell microblogging short because of the widespread mockery of Twitter. For example:

-Microblogging offers social networking, but unlike other SNS, asymmetric relationships are possible. This could be useful in organizations because organizational relationships are often asymmetrical. Everyone can follow the CEO or Dean, but perhaps he/she does not follow everyone else.

-Microblogging shares the "brief and to the point" benefits of IM.

-Microblogging shares with wikis the public nature of conversations, which encourages collaborative building of new knowledge, and legitimate peripheral participation

Tyson McMillan gave a dynamic presentation about his study of how accessible Web 2.0 sites are, using the Web Accessibility Barrier score created by Parmanto and Zeng (2005). This gives a quantitative metric rather than a pass/fail grade, as many accessibility tests do. The 176 sites in this work (88 Web 1.0 and 88 Web 2.0) had to be evaluated manually (Excel) so in order to keep scope manageable, this work evaluated only the home page of each site in this sample.

Two major ways creators can increase the accessibility of Web 2.0 sites is to

Eileen Abels gave an overview of the IPL. It is merging with Librarian’s Index to the Internet.

Marie Radford reported results from an IMLS-funded project which found big differences between adult and "Net Gen" users of virtual reference services. In her analysis, she found that Net Gen users were not treated as well as adult users. Once they use the services, most users said they would use the service again, although less Net Gen users: 82% = Net Gen, 92% = adult.

Why users don’t choose VRS

-unhelpful answers

-non-subject specialist

-slow connections

-scripted messages

-cold environment

What would attract users to VRS?

-faster and easier software

-personalized interface

-reliable cobrowser

Both face to face and VRS users want:

-extended hours of service

-access to electronic information

-interact with friendly librarians

-Relationships with librarians (this is why Tutor.com is successful)

What we can do?

-Creative marketing.Promote full range of options and reassure young people VRS is safe

-Normative, trying to teach the asker something (54%). Hard to make this determination (i.e. What is 237 divided by 9, Romaine Lettuce

High-level users have more leeway to editorialize, but with public reputations, their intent can be better gauged by the community when posting non-responsive content

Intentionally bad answers can help people cultivate a more critical and refined view of information quality

Takeaways: This session was quite amusing, but in all seriousness, it revealed how users in an online community can use a surprising array of sophisticated communicationtechniques, such as sarcasm, and how “respected” users in a community can exert social influence through a pretty “thin” medium.